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With
the incredible interest in all things Texas Holdem
poker-related on television, it’s no surprise that
big-time tournament players are getting recognition
similar to what’s accorded professional athletes. Even
Hollywood stars like James Woods, Mimi Rogers, and Ben
Affleck can be found playing poker tournaments when
they’re between movies. Finding a game is easy. It’s no
further away than your neighborhood casino or the
Internet, so it’s no wonder that many new players are
shouting out to anyone willing to listen that they plan
to become professional poker players after the few short
months they figure it will take them to master the game.
Few of them, however, have really taken stock of what
the life of a professional poker player is like, and
fewer still have done the math necessary to assess just
how their chance of success pans out based on nothing
more than the numbers alone.
Try
as one may, the top of the food chain is extremely
competitive, and not just anyone can elbow his or her
way in there. It takes more than most
Texas
Holdem
players
realize.
It’s
easy to get excited about the upside to playing poker
for a living. Work for yourself. Set your own hours.
Play when and where you want, and the earning potential
is incredible if you can work your way up to the top
echelon of the game.
I
don’t think a single reader needs prodding about the
upside of this business. It’s the downside that so many
refuse to examine logically. So, let’s take off our
rose-colored glasses and in this two-part series we’ll
look at some of professional poker’s downsides and
examine the differences between playing tournament poker
versus specializing in cash games as a way to make a
living.
One
major deterrent to playing poker for a living is that
professional poker is one of the few jobs where you can
go to work and lose money. Even commissioned
salespeople, who earn money only if they make a sale,
don’t really suffer financial losses if they fail to
close a deal. While commissions aren’t earned without
making a sale, at least no one reaches into the
salesperson’s pocket and takes money away if he or she
is not successful. But that’s just what happens in
poker. You can go to work and lose money. It happens all
the time.
Professional
Texas
Holdem
poker
players are also responsible for their own health
insurance, as well as for squirreling money away for the
future. Playing poker is not like holding down a job in
corporate America. There’s no health insurance, no
deferred compensation, and no stock options available.
If you don’t create your own benefits, you won’t have
any. Many players ignore these safety-net factors. When
first starting out, especially when relatively young,
the thought of saving for one’s retirement is often too
remote for consideration, and health insurance seems a
redundancy when one is fit and healthy. Still, no one is
more than a single misstep away from catastrophe, and
saving for the future is something everyone ought to do.
If you’re wise enough to pay yourself first by living a
bit below your means and saving a dime out of every
dollar earned, and began doing this at age 20, you’ll be
financially secure by middle age. The secret is
investing and reaping the benefits of compound interest,
the eighth wonder of the world.
Life
as a tournament
Texas
Holdem
poker
player can be difficult even under the best of
circumstances. Let’s do the math and see why. Using the
2004 World Series of Poker as a guide, an event
with 400-500 players paid 45 participants, which works
out to somewhere between 9 percent and 11 percent of the
field. While that might sound good to you, it’s
important to realize that all tournaments are
front-loaded. In a WSOP event with 450 players,
more than 50 percent of the prize pool is paid to the
first three places, and a staggering 81 percent of the
prize pool goes to those making the final table.
Finishing anywhere from 11th to 45th earns you bubkes,
which is Yiddish for not very much, but it sounds
better.
Once
you figure that you really have to make the top three
for a decent payday, it’s important to figure out the
cost of entering tournaments. Once you begin adding up
the cost of buy-ins, you’ll quickly find that you’ll
need to earn at least $200,000 annually, and possibly
more, to pay your way into most of the big tournaments.
On top of that, you have all the expenses of traveling
and living on the road. With fields so large, it’s
entirely possible for even the very best players to go a
year or two without cashing in any meaningful way. When
you consider this, it’s no wonder that many well-known
poker players seem to take turns being broke, living a
constant cycle of borrowing when things aren’t going
well and then staking others when they’re flush with
cash.
If
you’re not one of the very best, but only a marginally
successful tournament player, you might find yourself
clinging to one of the bottom rungs of the ladder. Many
marginal tournament professionals eventually slip off
the ladder entirely and find themselves forced to earn a
living outside of poker. Other professionals have
outside sources of income. Regardless of whether it’s a
trust fund or the result of a stunning business success,
many poker players have a steady income stream to smooth
out the incredible fluctuations endemic to playing poker
for a living. That’s not to be sniffed at, either. It’s
a lot easier to take a big loss or suffer a protracted
losing streak when you know that a check is coming in at
month’s end.
Because of this, it’s difficult to assess whether a
player is successful at
Texas
Holdem
poker or
not. With outside sources of money to buoy them up,
players can go for a long time without anyone else — and
sometimes not even the players themselves — realizing
they’re losing at poker but surviving through other
sources of income.
Top-notch players realize the implications of this, and
the majority of the best pros invest some of their
winnings in order to diversify their income stream. I
probably qualify as a poster child for this kind of
behavior. I’ve never earned more than 40 percent of my
income from poker, and created diversity by investing
winnings, earning money by writing, and for too long a
time, had a (gulp) real job. Thankfully, the job is long
gone, but the other sources of income are still there,
and because of the current poker feeding frenzy, my
books sell so well that the percentage of money earned
by playing poker has dropped way down by comparison.
To
all of you who aspire to play
Texas
Holdem
tournament
poker for a living, my advice is to have a backup source
of earning a living — a “Plan B” — firmly in hand. Just
in case all goes south, you won’t find yourself
destitute and on the rail, looking to put the touch on
friends who probably will begin avoiding you like the
plague anyway.
Next
time, we’ll look at some of the issues related to
playing cash-game poker for a livelihood. |
